SUMMARY

Human motivation is a product of very complex mechanisms interacting
with very complex physical and social environments.

If we find certain sorts of motives (e.g. wanting to watch films that
make you sad, or wanting to do things that are very dangerous) puzzling
then we need to understand the mechanisms the produce and change
human motives instead of simply explaining them as if they were products
of rational decision making.

In particular there are clearly very powerful motives that can be
extremely harmful to the individuals concerned for instance, addictions
of various sorts, including chemical addictions and addictions to things
like gambling.

My suggestion is that the mechanisms that produce addictions may be
closely related to, or even the same as, the mechanisms that produce
many other kinds of emotions, except that addictions are an extreme case
of their operation.

To understand all this we'll need to understand the
information-processing architecture produced by millions of years of
biological evolution. Introspection, and the traditional methods of
philosophy (conceptual analysis) and psychology (looking for behavioural
correlations) are unlikely to produce deep theories of what the
architecture is. For that we need to adopt the design-based approach.

My comments below were provoked by these postings to the ISRE list
on the topic of 'positive negative emotions'.

AV wrote:
Tuesday, June 20, 2006 7:36 AM

> Who can help me to answer the question why people like to hear
> sad music or why (especially women?) like to watch tearjerkers?

R.B. wrote, the same day:

> It is an interesting and often overlooked fact that people pay good
> money to experience "negative" emotions like sadness, fear, anger,
> even disgust.

Notice that, as someone else remarked, that is true even of
uncontrollable terror and real danger -- on roller coasters, etc.

Warning:
I am quoting selectively to save space. Join
ISRE
to see
everything.

[R.B.]
> I think of this in term of emotional education: that we are
> motivated by curiosity to explore, learn about, and become
> competent in the inner environment of feelings and desires just
> like the external environment. In this view, there are no
> "negative" emotions, in that the feelings and desires per se are
> not unpleasant. Instead, emotions are informative, and it is when
> they inform us of bad things that they are negative.

Other contributors have offered their own explanations in terms of what
people experience, why they choose things, reasons, justifications, etc.

[T.S.]
> One problem, having made these distinction: it seems necessary
> to explain in some detail what we mean by each of the four terms.
> That is, to develop CONCEPTS of emotions instead of depending
> entirely on the vernacular emotion names.

There is another way to proceed, which is to introduce a sub-personal
theory-based ontology to make sense of, fill gaps in, remove
(some) inconsistencies
in, ordinary language, as the atomic theory of matter
did for pre-theoretical kinds of stuff ('air', 'earth', 'copper',
'water', 'fire', etc.) It is usually impossible to remove all
inconsistencies in a deep theory -- that's a source of
progress, as Popper and Lakatos and others have pointed out:

This will make some people think: 'go away you materialist
reductionist'. But I don't believe virtual machine concepts of the kinds
we need are reducible
to physical concepts: though they may be in some sense
explicable in terms of deeper, more general virtual machine concepts.
(Some of you have heard this from me before.)

The 'design stance':
Sometimes it is useful not to think of an intelligent
individual concerned as the beneficiary or otherwise of
motives, decisions, preferences, etc., but something more
abstract: e.g. some of the genes involved.

In such cases we need to seek explanations that don't simply adopt the
'common sense' view of the person as doing something for reasons (the
'intentional stance'), but rather treat a person as a complex
information processing system with many subsystems doing different
things, often with side-effects none of them was specifically aiming at.
(E.g. some illusions and emotional bugs.)

Genes that produce mechanisms that produce motives that increase the
likelihood of propagation of those genes may have a tendency to spread
even if each individual with that gene would have done better (e.g.
lived longer, required less exertion) without that motive.

One of the obvious cases is the set of mechanisms producing
desires related to reproduction: successful mating and subsequent
care of offspring has great benefit for genes that influence the
development of mechanisms creating those desires, but also has a
high biological cost for individuals with those mechanisms, for
mothers and in many cases fathers also (e.g. birds where male
hand female share the feeding).

[Some women say 'never again' after the suffering of giving birth: yet
two or three years later their deep biological mechanisms get working to
override that decision, even if they remember it well. I have seen
that happen very close to home.]

Mechanisms have evolved to drive them to take the actions necessary
for reproduction despite the high cost to themselves.

Of course, they can sometimes be countered by other mechanisms, by
cultures, by mechanisms that grow under the influence of cultures, etc.
It's the most complex multi-functional information-based control system
on the planet. (So far.)

The mechanisms that produce motives, pleasures, and pains, in humans are
very complex, are of many kinds, and they develop in the lifetime of
individuals under the influence of many factors, and can sometimes
change in ways that are not only harmful to the individuals but also
reduce the reproductive success of the very genes that contribute to
producing the mechanisms.

Examples are mechanisms that produce dangerous addictions involving very
powerful desires. Those mechanisms were not selected for that purpose:
they are too destructive. This must be a side effect of their
main functions, or the main functions of other things that interact with
them. (Any engineer will know of many examples like that.)

Some of those mechanisms involve chemical interactions, while others
have to be explained in terms of the operation of virtual machines
(e.g. addiction to gambling?)

This is just a special case of the general principle that
any complex
design with multiple control mechanisms processing many different kinds
of information is liable in some circumstances to produce side-effects
that differ from and even undermine the effects the mechanisms were
originally selected for: the more complex a software system the more
likely it is to have bugs -- 'undesirable' side-effects of some of the
interactions of components that in themselves are normally useful.

[That's one reason why governments should never plan to introduce very
large and complex systems designed and implemented as a whole -- like
the UK's planned system for the health service. The chances of getting
such things right, or even finishing them on time and within budget are
infinitesimal (like re-engineering the mouse genome to produce
cats) no matter how much prior consultation and analysis is
involved, and no matter how clever and experienced the designers, simply
because of the combinatorics.

The more different sorts of parts there are the more subsets need
to be checked: an exponential growth.]

Maybe, just maybe, love of music, of thrills, of tragedies, of
suffering of others, of doing mathematics, of dancing, singing,
listening to music, watching plays, etc. may be more akin to addictions
of various kinds than to rational processes to be explained by
reasons.

For me, reading novels has a disruptive effect similar to an addiction,
so I don't start any except on holiday. (If I am not too far behind with
other things.)

Fortunately, my addiction to some kinds of music (e.g. Bach
contrapuntal instrumental music, and Mozart piano concertos) does
not seem to interfere with writing messages like this. (Most of
the time.) But I don't listen to it because it produces some
other effect, as far as I know.

If I did that the same question would
arise about why I seek that effect -- leading to an infinite
regress of explanations (as
many philosophers have pointed out, e.g. G.Ryle
The
concept of Mind 1949).

> We have done studies with music videos and found that people like
> some videos if the music makes them sad, others if music makes
> them happy, others if music makes them feel powerful, etc. (Buck,
> 1988). But, across all the videos, people liked them if the music
> made them interested and disliked them if the music made them
> bored.

Most of the things you like, you like for their own sake, not because of
side effects. Why do I say that? Because you would not want them
replaced with something else that produced the same effects. Think about
what 'being totally absorbed in solving a problem' (or listening to a
fugue) means. If you did it for the side effects, you would not be
totally absorbed by the problem or the music. But humans (including my
wife) can be totally absorbed in some task (G.Ryle).

Research methodology
Moreover, asking people questions about these postulated benefits
of listening to music or doing mathematics things is open to
familiar problems: What people are conscious of and can tell you
about what they like or dislike is a function of the extent to
which they have architectures that are capable of accurate
self-monitoring of internal processes. People vary in this. Some
kinds of self-monitoring come from intense training as any
experienced musician or programmer knows.

We do have some limited common functionality of that sort (e.g. you can
answer the optician's questions about which lens makes a pattern look
sharper, and record some of what you were recently thinking). A painter
who tries to paint how things are as opposed to how they look will
produce a six-year old's paintings. Or may be a cubist.

But there's always far more going on than we can report on.

I've watched a four and a half year old child try to copy an
outline square without success. He knew he was failing and got
upset, but did not notice that his problem was at least partly
due to trying to draw all four sides in one movement. If I
encouraged him to stop after each side and think where the next
one has to go he managed. But he still did not notice what was
making him successful in those cases, and got very frustrated:
By then he wanted to draw the square, not to get some
happiness from drawing it.

Limits to self-monitoring
E.g. most people have no access to the grammatical and phonological
rules they use every day in producing and understanding language (e.g.
rules about tag questions being negated if the main clause is not
negated and vice versa, as in

The train has arrived, hasn't it?
The train hasn't arrived, has it?

[How many people know they use that rule? There are special
circumstances where the rule is broken.])

Likewise the person who experiences the Ebbinghaus illusion
(seeing a disc as bigger or smaller than others of the same
physical size) at the same time as accurately opening finger and
thumb exactly far enough to grasp the disc will not know why it
looks the wrong size even though the brain clearly has and uses
information about the actual size.
[Many attempts to explain this miss the point that visual
servoing -- e.g. controlling continuous actions -- needs
to be done by different mechanisms from producing re-usable
descriptions of the current situation. More needs to be said
about why the latter task should generally not use precise
metrical information required for the former -- it's partly to
do with explosive search-spaces in a continuum.]

So there's no reason to think that asking people why they like something
or why they do something will always produce answers to scientific
questions: even if the answers are consistent with one another.

(Many people understandably thought the earth was flat once: after all,
it looks pretty flat most of the time -- how things
look, inside or outside is just more evidence to be explained.)

[R.B.]
> That suggests that listening to music is a kind of exploratory
> behavior where one is exploring one's own feelings and desires.
> The more fear elicited by a horror show, the more anger and sense
> of power elicited by an action-adventure, the more tears jerked
> by a tearjerker, the better they are generally regarded. That is
> the case with much of the phenomenon we term "entertainment," I
> think.

Or maybe things are going on whose explanation is no more amenable to
introspective reflection of that sort than the details of our linguistic
processing or our visual processing, or our posture control are.

Music has been very important to me most of my life -- both as a
listener and as a player, but I don't think I have any idea why,
and nothing I've read about it, including that comment, seems
consistent with everything I know about music.

Likewise what I've read about emotions. (Partly because there are so
many theories that contradict one another.)

Perhaps we need to try build theories about
deepmechanisms,
where
most of the evidence and tests are far more indirect than asking people
questions. I.e. we may need to use the 'design stance' in order to get a
deep understanding of all of linguistic processing, visual processing
and emotional processing (and many other things, like changes in tastes,
conceptual development, the growth of self-awareness) even if
introspective reports provide some of the data.

Having said all that, I am not yet impressed by most of the
current computational attempts to model emotional phenomena that
have so far come out of AI: they typically focus on a tiny subset
of relevant facts to be explained, e.g. shallow behavioural
manifestations, ignoring all the stuff novelists and playwrights
know about.

They are not based on
deep
conceptual analysis,
cross species
surveys, functional requirements for architectures, and other
constraints.

Sorry this is all sounds negative. I think we can and
will make
progress, but it will be slow and requires kinds of
cross-disciplinary co-operation most people don't have time for,
because of pressures of funding, tenure, etc. I was extremely
lucky not to have those pressures for a long time after I became
a lecturer in 1962. As a result
wonderful people of many kinds taught
me many things. I wish I were better at passing it on.